Tricks detonate.
You build a tank say its confusing
when the rapist has pupils shaped like a snake.

I wake up with hope (hearse songs help you heal)
in the boughs of the house.

Autonomy how
no thick eyelashes a blood-stained mattress
red-studded cups.

The second wave of cicadas
devalued the mushrooms the cub locked and loaded.
Sisters dying their blonde black
sat at the autoharp shredded me in
said how he said from under the mask
think about orange lips
your seaside scent burning.

I said I meant midnight
my cat so tight under my plaid skirt I couldnt piss.
I wish I loved time enough
to wake up and confront it and stretch it exquisite
and incriminate. The lion didnt make it

but fill me in on how you claim
you cool the abrasions
in my soft white insides.

~ ~ ~

It Could Be a Hoarse Exaggeration

but not too much of one
torture environment loyalty pleasure
and 14 Texans killing moon dead
a tiger-striped bride.
The black-water menu
the spirograph steps are so sweet and loving I might drop the baby
but well wake up eventually w/ the tin donkey the fox hiding its head.
Youll say want a bloodbath story
and hurry before all treats are gone.

The girls go to the dance
crossing the ballfield in long lacy wounds
tetanus and thick heels and Peter Pan collars
understanding my struggle is part and parcel
since its like being drugged
no desire for sex and there are deaf cats dumb underwires
no health anywhere

since the summer descends
like an alien ship
no food for six days. Your wife runs away
since my patterned stockings weave some magic around you
and I squat to pee
bangs blunt and French on your canopied bed
and I wear my skull necklace
and then you run away without seeing me.

~ ~ ~

Close-up Nocturnal

Right there. Turn your head. You will not cry
with joy or shame

watching the rabbit
die to the side
of the stunt girls hairy back.
The stunt girls name is Key
her gun glowing green.
Her brain is too small
and she does nothing
for your toyshadow the luxury
of your sweet infertility.
Cicadas fly limply at night
theyve lost all sense of time

The murderess was young once
her hips growing bigger dive-bombing sex with every existence.
The sun doesnt penetrate the chartreuse lagoon
the grass widows war wound the low burn of complicity.

You tire of black exoskeletons
want your hair white like Judy Jetsons.
Your long sleep is denial in the nymph stage
a weak heart a bad cough
a Jean Harlow death double.
The sun is an animal.
and what can it mean
when you exit the crime scene untouched?

Jessie Janesheks Comments

Im ardently interested in nostalgia in general and pre-code Hollywood in particular; my first book, Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010), was very much about this.

Because I felt like Id already done a pre-code Hollywood book, I didnt let that stuff in my work for a while. Summer 2016 was the first time I allowed myself to revisit that era. I reread several of my favorite books on the period, including Mick LaSalles Complicated Women and bios of Harlow and Crawford and started to let some of what I was absorbing trickle back into my poems. Rereading the poems, I realize thats probably not even apparent.

Simultaneously, I was nostalgic for the time (2007–2010) when I wrote the first batch of starlet poems; I always see past times in my life as gentler than the present whether thats true or not. So these poems are kind of personal nostalgia heaped on cultural nostalgia, if that makes any sense.

The other thing going on at the time I was writing these was the Brock Turner rape case, which incensed me and still does. I hate that dude and the systematic white male privilege he represents. So these poems are sad in that way, too, as they attempt to explore the mindscape of victims (not the young woman whom Turner assaulted, but victims in a more general sense), which is why I submitted them to be considered for the Shame Issue.